The report, which as always is on sale to relevant parties at relevant prices, found that "nearly 70% of 2022 spend would originate from medium-sized businesses, as cybercriminals target ‘low-hanging fruit’".

In the context of strategies for financial services, mobile operators, enterprise and IoT service providers, Juniper says its research "highlighted that stakeholders’ digital transformation and IoT endeavours were key catalysts for increasing spend to defend assets from threats".

Cyber attacks: not if, but when

Juniper states that it :anticipates that the cumulative cost of data breaches between 2017 and 2022 will reach US$8 trillion, with variable per-business losses depending on the nature and scale of the attack.

"Shipping company Maersk, for example, estimated the cost of NotPetya infecting its global network in 2017 at between US$200 and US$300 million."

Juniper argued that, "as a result, stakeholders must plan in terms of risk mitigation rather than prevention. It predicted that service providers in high-risk environments would be forced to restructure their networks to avoid potential compliance breaches, data theft or service outage".

Meanwhile, the research found that "securing the IoT, with 46 billion connected units anticipated in 2021, would require more forward-thinking. With devices ‘in the field’ for years at a time, adopting a cybersecurity strategy that is flexible enough to react to future demands would be essential".

"It highlighted the fact that cyber criminals’ efforts soon render modern approaches less effective. For example, the Cerber family of ransomware has analysed how machine learning systems detect malware behaviour and applied evasion techniques as a result."

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One of Australia’s best-known technology journalists and consumer tech experts, Alex has appeared in his capacity as technology expert on all of Australia’s free-to-air and pay TV networks on all the major news and current affairs programs, on commercial and public radio, and technology, lifestyle and reality TV shows. Visit Alex at Twitter here.